Traumas, tumours and bombs: Robert Lepage on his childhood in Quebec

Traumas, tumours and bombs: Robert Lepage on his childhood in Quebec

From his sister’s brain tumour to his family’s cramped flat, the revered actor and director Robert Lepage has plundered his childhood to tell the story of Quebec’s often violent struggle for independence. As his solo show 887 hits Edinburgh, he takes an emotional tour of his hometown

Robert Lepage is standing in Parc des Braves, looking down on the lower part of Quebec City. This afternoon, the revered director of such theatrical epics as The Seven Streams of the River Ota – which featured everything from the bombing of Hiroshima to concentration camps and Aids – is on home turf. And it’s got him thinking back to his very first memory. He couldn’t have been any older than three and was standing in this same spot with his father. “I remember asking him, ‘What’s that odd thing?’,” he says, gesturing to the Colisée de Québec, a hockey stadium to the north.

His family had just moved to an apartment at 887 Avenue Murray and it felt like a big step up. His father, a taxi driver, had been brought up in poverty. With a wife, four children and a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, he was scarcely better off in the new three-bedroom apartment but, crucially, it was only two streets away from the wealthy properties of Avenue des Braves. In this polarised city (upper and lower town, French and English, Catholic and Protestant, rich and poor) the move seemed full of promise. “He was so excited, he brought us here to show us the view.”

Dressed in black, Lepage has a soft-spoken manner that belies a restless intelligence, a gift for storytelling and a mischievous sense of humour. At 57, he has been dwelling on the past. On stage in his new solo show 887, he uses his childhood address as a jumping-off point to explore the nature of memory. This applies as much to Lepage’s childhood recollections as it does to how modern Quebec remembers the politics of that charged time.

“I tell this simple, nostalgic family thing about me and my sister playing with the neighbours,” he says of 887, one of the most eagerly awaited shows of this year’s Edinburgh International festival. “But within those anecdotes, there’s a bigger picture about the rise of nationalism and the visit to Canada of Charles de Gaulle.”

We head for 887 Avenue Murray and find ourselves watched by curious neighbours in a street unaccustomed to sightseers. Built in the city’s vernacular style, it’s an inauspicious brick-lined rectangular block with balconies at the front. “It’s weird standing here,” he says. “I feel so big. There were just three small bedrooms, so there were people sleeping in the living room. I had to sleep in my sister’s bedroom for eight years.”

Earlier, at La Caserne, home of his Ex Machina theatre company, Lepage showed me the scale model of the building that forms the set of 887. Standing little taller than head height, it has video monitors in place of windows, a wall that rolls back to reveal the headlights of a car, and it can turn on a sixpence. Designing it was a revelation: “Just measuring the size of the rooms and the number of people, it’s no wonder we wanted to leave home!”

With his younger sister Lynda, he set about turning old family photographs into projections for the show. The detail took them aback. “You’ve seen these pictures thousands of times, but without really looking at them. When you project them, you see the tapestry on the walls, the toy plastic bus on the sofa, the colouring pencils in a little box that was given to your brother. And you start crying. I never thought it would do that to me.”

Family portraits had a similar effect. There’s the one of him and Lynda dressed in beautiful suits about to go to mass: “You see in our eyes that we are unhappy and traumatised. It was that Easter my other sister had a brain tumour and she was operated on.”

It was at Parc des Braves that, as a nine-year-old in 1967, Lepage cheered along with the crowd as De Gaulle drove by. The next day in Montreal, the French president ended a speech from the city hall with a cry of: “Vive le Québec libre!” For a foreign head of state to call for a free Quebec was an extraordinary break from diplomatic protocol, not least because those words were the slogan used by the separatist organisation Rally for National Independence.

What’s more, it was a gesture that gave a boost to the nationalist movement at a time when the Front de Libération du Québec was four years into a bombing campaign. This would culminate with the October crisis of 1970, when the murder of a government minister was followed by a general strike and the suspension of civil liberties.

Lepage at the door of his childhood home in Quebec. Photograph: Michel Emond

What people forget about this movement, says Lepage, is that it was born not from a dislike of English-speakers, but from a working-class struggle. What was taking place in Quebec, he says, was mirrored around the world. “It was nothing to do with, ‘We are French and we don’t like the English.’ It was, ‘We are the poor working class and we speak French, and the big bosses have American or British accents.’ 887 is not a show that promotes separatism or federalism. It just says, ‘Try to remember what happened.’”

It seems like an uncharacteristically contentious topic for a director whose solo shows such as Needles and Opium, The Far Side of the Moon, and The Andersen Project have favoured the personal over the political. His work has, however, always been rooted in his home city, even when dealing with questions of global identity.

“Theatre is the grand sport of memory,” he says. “The first time you perform a play as a kid, people say, ‘How did you remember all those lines?’ as if that’s what it’s about. But theatre is also about remembering what human nature is about.”